A review for Le Monde, by Richard Jacquemond (April 6, 2025)
One seeks to forget, the other longs to remember. Both are refugees in the United States. The new novel by Iraqi writer Sinan Antoon—himself exiled in America—is composed of the shattered pieces of a broken country.
Given the country’s recent history of dictatorship, wars, and foreign occupation, it is hardly surprising that nearly all Iraqi writers available in translation today live in exile. That is the case for Sinan Antoon, born in Baghdad in 1967, who left Iraq after the First Gulf War in 1991 and settled in the United States, his mother’s homeland. Perfectly bilingual (he translates poetry and other works both into English and Arabic), Antoon is a poet and novelist who chose to continue writing in Arabic, a language in which he says he enjoys greater freedom of expression than in English. An engaged intellectual, he frequently appears in the media to comment on the situation in Iraq, which he has been able to revisit since 2003.
“Of Loss and Lavender” is his fifth novel, and the third to be translated into French, following The Corpse Washer (Seul le grenadier, Actes Sud, Arab Literature Prize 2017) and Ave Maria (Actes Sud, 2018). Like his previous works, it is deeply rooted in the contemporary history of his native country, yet this is the first of his novels to approach that history through the lens of exile. A bit like his fellow Iraqi writer Inaam Kachachi—herself exiled in France—does in her novel The Outcast (L’Indésirable, Gallimard, 2024), Antoon tells the story of two Iraqi refugees in the United States, whose paths cross—ironically or fatefully—because of a shared appreciation for lavender. They meet again at the very end of the book, having previously encountered one another in Iraq under tragic circumstances.
Sami and Omar are total opposites. Omar, the younger of the two, fled Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship in the 1990s after enduring the punishment reserved for deserters: having one ear amputated and spending two years in prison. From a poor background, he spent two years saving money for a fake passport. Upon arrival in the U.S., he was sent to a Detroit suburb with a large Arab community—much to his dismay, as he wanted to erase his past entirely. At the first opportunity, he moved to New Jersey, where he was hired by a young couple who had left city life to raise goats. After learning that his first name was common among Latin Americans, he began passing himself off as Puerto Rican. He entangles himself in lies that prevent him from forming meaningful romantic relationships.
A Story Told Through Shifting Timeframes
Sami, on the other hand, left Iraq after the American invasion of 2003. A top surgeon at the height of his career, he lost his brother—a university professor murdered in the wave of purges following the U.S. occupation—and later his wife, who died as collateral damage in a bomb attack. Like much of Iraq’s intellectual elite, Sami was accused of being a Ba’athist (a member of Saddam Hussein’s party), an accusation that alone put his life at risk. He chose to join his son, who had long been settled in the U.S. and was married to an American. But not long after his arrival, he began showing signs of dementia. His son tried everything to delay the inevitable, but Sami eventually had to be placed in a care home, where Carmen, a Puerto Rican nurse’s aide, cared for him by playing Arabic music—though this was not enough to halt the disease’s advance.
The novel alternates between chapters focused on one character or the other, with constant shifts in time and a complex structure that gradually reveals each man’s story. Memory is the driving force behind the narrative—Omar’s memory, which he desperately tries to erase but cannot (like the ear he still hides, even after reconstructive surgery), and Sami’s memory, which he wants to preserve but is steadily losing his grasp on. Sami’s slow descent into cognitive decline is powerfully rendered through free indirect discourse, where fragments of Arabic songs he listens to on repeat blend with his thoughts and hallucinations. The fractured timeline and the near-total absence of chronological markers reflect the brokenness and instability of both men’s memories. In this way, the writing mirrors the shattered lives of the (anti)heroes in this moving novel.
